Magazine Description

In this issue

Greg Egan’s March/April 2021 novella, “Light Up the Clouds,” is a far-future novella about a civilization living in the floating forests of a gas giant closely orbiting a dwarf star. Eons ago, catastrophic changes in their environment caused some of the population to flee the planet. As disruption threatens once again, the survivors must contact their long-lost “cousins” to determine why . . . After a brutal attack, the confused victim of a “Glitch” must face a team of terrorists in Alex Irvine’s thrilling new novella; Felicity Shoulders returns to our pages with a powerful and disturbing novelette about “Somebody’s Child”; Rudy Rucker tells us the rollicking story of “Mary Mary”; Michael Swanwick cautions a young scientist in “Dream Atlas”; a mining robot singing “Sentient Being Blues” becomes a sensation in Christopher Mark Rose’s first tale for Asimov’s; new author Anya Ow poignantly whips up “The Same Old Story”; new author A.T. Greenblatt reveals the temporally complicated and ultimately heartbreaking correspondence “RE: Bubble 476”; the master of quiet terror, Kali Wallace, does it again in “Mrs. Piper Between the Sea and Sky”; Derek Künsken makes a sharp point in “Flowers Like Needles”; and James Patrick Kelly brings us an unsettling future, a plucky heroine, and “Grandma +5°C.” Robert Silverberg’s Reflections column laments “Betelgeuse, We Hardly Knew Ye”; “The Games Afoot!” in James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net; in On Books, Peter Heck reviews work by Lois McMaster Bujold, Nancy Kress, Carrie Vaughn, Cat Rambo, and others.